SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "marketing"

Right now I am eating some "Copper Kettle Chips". They taste quite nice and they are aggressively crunchy.

The package has been printed with a fabric-like texture meant to evoke, I suppose, old-fashioned values, or the goodness of natural fibres, or something. I think so. Can you imagine how soggy and crushed your chips would be if they were really sold in hessian bags instead of gas-filled plastic? If I remember what Mum told me correctly, in the old days "crisps" came in sealed wax paper bags, with a sachet of salt, so this is actually a nostalgic gesture towards a past that never existed. (This is why even today some chips say "ready salted", because you don't have to open the sachet and salt them yourself.)

There is a lovely round seal in the upper left corner. In the centre it reads "Hawkes Bay Spuds by Vince's Team," printed charmingly askew with the "m" almost missing, as if to suggest that it had been stamped by hand rather than, as I suspect, by a large machine in a commercial print house.

The back features a tribute to "the Chapmans" -- apparently the potatoes are "lovingly grown by farmers like the Chapmans", who are represented by a headless shot of someone in overalls cradling spuds in their hands, although in my view this provides no particular reason to believe that the Chapmans actually exist, or indeed that the farmers who grew the potatoes really loved them. There is also a slogan "the perfect kettle chips" set in a font designed to imitate script, presumably because despite the ostensible care for the old-fashioned virtues, no one employed to design the packaging can actually use a pen or a brush. The same design people also created a wobbly horizontal rule that looks nicely irregular in the manner of a 19th century newspaper's blurry print, except they ruined the effect by using it twice, with exactly the same wobbles.

The chips purport to be made by "Copper Kettle Chips", which is not a name registered at the Companies Office. However, they are located at 124 Wiri Station Road, where they must be pretty crowded, because that's where you find Bluebird Foods Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pepsico Australia.

For some reason I find this sustained lying really fucking annoying. They're crunchy chips that taste nice and the bullshit just reduces the enjoyment, although I suppose I take a morbid pleasure in identifying every deceit in the packaging. I don't want a story. Just give me the damned chips.

Hot brand penetration tip -- if you're not sure whether the wine you bought is part of the Pernod-Ricard empire, which bought the chunk of Allied Domecq that used to be Montana, look for an address in Pilkington Road, Glen Innes, Auckland.

If it weren't for chemists, there would be no commercial brewing. Chemists and microbiologists between them figured out how to keep your beer clean, consistent, and uncontaminated. And they still do. You don't develop a whole new beer recipe for an industrial-scale process without chemists (or people trained with knowlege hard-won by chemists). Not if you don't want a lot of vinegar or worse returned by your grumpy customers.

I can tell you one thing for sure, which is that if Independent Breweries' scientists and technicians and engineers walked off the job, there would be empty shelves in a few weeks -- unless they hired some more.

Alternatively, brewers are a very specialised form of applied chemist. But anyway, what a mindless slur.

Also, just on another front, clearly brewers brew, but to keep the analogy going, chemists chem. FFS.

Update: as Perrin points out below, the original version of this post kept referring to Steinlager Pure, not NZ Pure. I can't explain why I made this mistake, except that the bottles look very similar and I was pretty irritated. Anyway, I fixed all the references, so Perrin's comment doesn't make sense any more. Sorry Perrin!

There is something peculiarly offensive about completely foreign-owned companies running campaigns that try to obscure the basic facts about their ownership. I've never really liked those jingoistic, crude sort of ads anyway, where professional deceivers repackage your own culture in order to sell you shit, but it seems worse when the implicit claim to local mana is made on behalf of foreign shareholders.

Note, I'd rather drink good foreign beer than inferior local stuff. I just don't like it when people try to distract me from noticing where the profits go.

I see a bunch of ads up around town advertising a low fat milk aimed at men. (Interestingly, they don't seemed to have bothered with an online campaign, or at least one that Google has noticed.)

The ads don't appeal to me, but I can certainly see why the manufacturers are having a crack.

You see, the men who drink the most milk don't like skim milk. And skim milk is more profitable to sell than whole milk, because the dairy company can sell the cream and the milk separately for more than the whole milk. In fact, if you add a little cheap chalk to skim milk to boost the calcium, or add a fancy brand, you can sell it on its own for more than whole milk, and then the recovered cream is, er, cream.

If you doubt me, imagine that the opposite was true. Imagine there was a better profit on selling whole milk. You'd be financially mad to try to persuade a big chunk of your market to switch to a less profitable product.

So a hardcore section of the market that stubbornly insists on less water in their milk is a problem. Hence the attempt to build a brand aimed at men.

Julian pointed me at this article by Duncan McLeod, in which he talks to the people behind the God billboards in Auckland. "Research carried out last year by the All About Life campaign in Australia showed that people did not want to know about God because their views of Christianity were that it was hypocritical, judgmental, intolerant and boring." Nothing that a few slick billboards won't fix.

I suppose "Godmarks" is an allusion to "Lovemarks" — not one that adds credibility as far as I'm concerned. Yea, turn aside from the branding of your fathers and turn to Kevin Roberts. Either that or something that requires a really special cleaning product to get off your sofa.

Alan is right about the bullshit surrounding the current Lions tour. Still, I can't get too worked about, because in the end I just don't give a rat's arse about rugby. The best thing that could happen to this country is for the All Blacks to suffer a string of crushing defeats until we all lose interest in the game and turn our energies to something more productive, like competitive Scrabble.

If you do like rugby, then here's the news. It is a sad fact that marketers will co-opt everything and anything you love in order to build their brand. Rugby is no more immune than your warm feelings towards your toddlers. If most people like rugby, and perceive certain virtues in it, then corporates will scramble to be associated with the game, and hope the impression of those virtues rubs off.

The only ways to escape having your enjoyment of the sport (or anything else) strip-mined for its valuable semiotic burden are to: